Running a Staff Charity Vote: A Practical UK Employer's Guide

The staff vote is the single most important moment in a Charity of the Year programme. Done well, it generates buy-in that carries the partnership through the year — fundraising events, volunteering days, internal communications all run easier because staff feel ownership of the choice. Done badly, it produces resentment, an apathetic launch, and a partnership that nobody really champions.

This guide is the operational counterpart to our Charity of the Year decision framework. It covers the practical mechanics of running an internal vote: how to structure nominations, how to shortlist fairly, which voting method to use, how to prevent brigading, and what to do when the result is awkward.

It assumes a UK SMB of 10–300 staff. Larger organisations need a multi-stage process with regional rounds, which is out of scope here.

The structure of a good staff vote

Almost every successful internal vote follows the same four-stage shape:

1. Nomination round — staff suggest charities (one or two per person, usually with a short reason)
2. Shortlist — a small steering group (HR, FD, one or two volunteers) trims the nominations to three to five candidates
3. Profile and campaign period — short written profiles of each shortlisted charity are circulated, and staff have time to consider
4. Vote — one-week voting window, results announced publicly

Each stage matters and each stage is commonly skipped or rushed. The biggest single mistake is jumping straight from “leadership suggests three charities” to “everyone vote” — it removes the most important step, which is letting staff put their own choices on the table.

Stage 1: Nominations

Open nominations for one to two weeks. Make the form short:

• The charity name and registered number (Charity Commission, OSCR, or CCNI)
• A two- or three-sentence reason for nominating
• A note of any personal or local connection
• The nominator’s name (visible to the steering group only)

Keep the nomination cap to one or two per person. Three or more dilutes the signal and produces noisy nomination rounds.

A few practical points:

• Open to all staff, including part-time, temporary, and recent joiners. Excluding new staff or contractors signals second-class membership of the programme.
• Be explicit about exclusion criteria before nominations open. Common written exclusions:
  • The charity must be a UK-registered charity (Charity Commission for England and Wales, OSCR for Scotland, or CCNI for Northern Ireland)
  • No charity currently subject to a Charity Commission inquiry or regulatory action
  • No charities whose work directly contradicts company values or major customer relationships (usually defined by category, e.g. political campaigning)
  • No conflicts of interest with current directors or senior employees (where one exists, declare and let the steering group decide on a case-by-case basis)
• Set expectations on the scale of the partnership. Letting staff nominate Cancer Research UK if your realistic fundraising total is £2,000 is fine, but the nomination guidance should hint at the scale of donation involved so people understand the trade-off between large and small charities.

If you get fewer than ten nominations in a workforce of fifty, that’s a comms problem — extend the deadline, send a reminder from a senior leader, and ask team leads to remind their teams.

Stage 2: The shortlist

The steering group’s job is to reduce the nominated list to a workable shortlist. There is no single right number, but the data on internal votes is reasonably consistent:

• Three charities — easy to compare, easy to vote on, low risk of vote-splitting
• Four charities — still manageable, slightly more variety, marginal risk of split
• Five charities — top end of useful; some staff will not read all five profiles
• Six or more — diminishing returns; vote often becomes a name-recognition contest

Shortlist by combining nomination signal with the criteria from the decision framework: governance, scale match, relevance, partnership capacity. The steering group should document why each shortlisted charity made the cut and — if there are unsuccessful nominations — give a one-line reason each.

Things to do during shortlisting:

• Verify each shortlisted charity on the Charity Commission register, OSCR, or CCNI
• Contact each shortlisted charity to confirm they are willing and able to enter a CotY partnership if selected. There is no point putting a charity on the ballot that doesn’t want the relationship.
• Get the basics from each charity: contact person, partnership history, capacity, any existing relationships with similar employers
• Declare conflicts — any steering group member with a personal connection to a shortlisted charity should be on the record

If a popular nomination doesn’t make the shortlist, write down the reason. The nominator deserves an explanation more thoughtful than “didn’t make the cut”.

Stage 3: Profiles and campaign period

This is the stage most employers skip and is the most underrated. Spend one week between shortlist and vote, with the following materials circulated:

• A one-page profile of each shortlisted charity, written by either the nominator or the charity itself (the nominator option produces more authentic copy)
• Links to the charity’s annual report and Charity Commission record so anyone curious can dig in
• A short summary of the proposed partnership — likely fundraising target, planned activities, volunteering scope

You can run this stage as a “campaign week” with each nominator advocating publicly for their charity. This works particularly well in smaller offices where the social dynamic is friendly enough that advocacy doesn’t feel like lobbying. In more distributed or formal workplaces, simply circulate the profiles and let staff read.

What you’re trying to avoid is the failure mode where staff vote based on name recognition alone — usually meaning the largest national charity wins by default, regardless of fit. Profiles level the playing field for smaller and less famous charities.

Stage 4: The vote itself

Voting mechanics matter more than people think. Three common options:

First-past-the-post (FPTP)

Each person picks one charity. The charity with the most votes wins. Simple, easy to explain, easy to count.

Best for: shortlists of three charities, or where one charity is a clear favourite.

Risk: With four or more charities, FPTP can produce a winner with 28% of the vote against three similar charities that split 72% between them. The “winner” is then a charity that the majority of staff did not actively want.

Approval voting

Each person ticks all the charities they would be happy to support. The charity with the most approvals wins.

Best for: shortlists of four or five charities, where the goal is to find the least-disliked option rather than the most-loved.

Risk: Produces consensus winners that don’t excite anyone. The energetic launch of a clear favourite gets replaced by “OK, fine, this one.”

Ranked-choice / single transferable vote (STV)

Each person ranks the charities. The lowest-ranked is eliminated and its votes redistributed by next preference, repeated until one charity has a majority.

Best for: shortlists of five or more, or where you specifically want a majority winner.

Risk: Some staff find ranked-choice confusing, the count is harder to explain, and the result can feel like it depended on the elimination order.

For most SMBs, first-past-the-post with a three- or four-charity shortlist is the right answer. Use STV if you genuinely have five or six similar-strength candidates and want a majority winner.

Practical voting setup

• Voting window of one working week — Monday morning to Friday evening. Long enough to catch people on annual leave or part-time hours, short enough to avoid the campaign losing energy.
• Anonymous form — most staff prefer not to disclose their vote internally. Use Microsoft Forms, Google Forms, or similar; turn off the name-capture option.
• One vote per person — verify by email address. Don’t get fancier than this.
• Don’t show running totals during the vote. Live counts produce bandwagon effects and can be discouraging for supporters of trailing charities.
• Announce the result publicly — usually a short all-hands message from the CEO or a senior sponsor, with the result, the turnout, and the next steps.

Preventing brigading

Brigading — a coordinated group voting tactically — is rare in SMB workplace votes but worth thinking about.

The realistic failure modes:

• One team nominates the same charity en masse, dominating the shortlist
• A single charity’s supporters lobby aggressively during the campaign period
• A senior leader signals their preference loudly, pressuring junior staff to fall in line

Practical defences:

• Cap nominations per person. One nomination per person reduces the “stack the ballot” risk during the nomination round.
• Run the shortlist on more than raw nomination count. A charity that gets eight nominations from one team should be on the shortlist if it’s otherwise a good fit, but it shouldn’t bump a charity nominated by spread-out staff with strong rationale.
• Equal vote weighting. A junior developer’s vote counts the same as the CEO’s. Don’t weight by tenure, seniority, or office.
• Senior leaders communicate carefully. It’s fine for a leader to nominate or even campaign — within explicit norms — but a CEO whose preferred charity wins 95-3-2 has run a coronation, not a vote.

If brigading does happen and a charity wins on visibly tactical voting, the right response is usually to honour the result. Overturning a fair vote on suspicion damages every future vote far more than a slightly compromised outcome damages the current one.

Communicating the result

Once the vote closes, move quickly.

The same day:

• Announce the winner internally with the result, the turnout, and a short message of thanks to all nominators
• Notify the winning charity with a brief confirmation and an invitation to a kick-off conversation
• Notify the unsuccessful charities with a polite message — they may still want to engage with your staff in smaller ways

Within the week:

• Schedule a kick-off call with the winning charity to confirm scope, fundraising target, and key milestones
• Draft the partnership document — see our decision framework for what to include
• Plan the public launch — usually a short all-hands or company-wide email with the charity’s leadership, the year’s fundraising target, and the first planned activity

Within the month:

• Run the first activity — a launch event, a volunteering day, an initial donation, or simply a representative from the charity speaking at a team meeting. Momentum from the vote dissipates quickly if there is no follow-up activity.

When the vote produces a weird result

Most votes produce a sensible winner. Occasionally something odd happens:

A tie

For three- or four-way races, ties happen more often than you’d expect with small electorates. Three options in order of preference:

1. Run a tie-breaker round with just the tied charities — a one-day re-vote works well
2. Apply a pre-declared tie-break rule — e.g. the charity nominated by the most distinct staff wins, or the one with the lowest income (greatest marginal impact)
3. Run both for half the year each — operationally messy and usually a worse partnership for both charities, but possible

Option 1 is normally cleanest. Option 2 needs to have been declared before the vote.

A controversial winner

Sometimes a charity wins that the leadership team finds politically or commercially difficult — perhaps it campaigns on an issue that conflicts with a major customer, or its work is in a polarising area. If the exclusion criteria were clear and the charity passed them, the result stands. Overruling damages internal trust.

If genuine new information emerges between vote and launch (governance failure, regulatory action, conflict of interest discovered after the fact), treat it as a due-diligence problem rather than a vote problem. Explain clearly, re-open the vote with the new information, and rerun.

A landslide for the CEO’s favourite

If 80% of the vote goes to a charity that the CEO openly campaigned for, the vote is technically clean but politically suspect. The risk isn’t this year — it’s that next year’s vote attracts fewer nominations because staff feel the outcome was predetermined.

The defence is usually pre-emptive: senior leaders agree not to publicly campaign during the nomination and vote stages, even if they personally nominate. Their preferences come out in the steering group conversation, not in the public ballot.

Embarrassingly low turnout

If only 20% of staff vote, that’s a different problem. Possible causes:

• The communication failed (vote announced once, no reminders)
• The shortlist felt unrepresentative
• People didn’t see the relevance to themselves
• The vote happened during a busy week (year-end close, summer holidays)

The right response is usually to extend the window by two or three days, send a senior-leader reminder, and accept whatever turnout you end up with. Don’t void the vote unless turnout is genuinely too low to be meaningful (under 25% in a small workforce).

Connecting the vote to the rest of the programme

The vote isn’t the goal — picking a charity that staff will actually fundraise for is the goal. The mechanics of what happens after the vote matter just as much:

• Setting fundraising targets — the launch communication should include an indicative target so staff know what success looks like
• Matched giving — if the employer is matching, announce it at the launch, not later. Matching is the single biggest driver of fundraising effort.
• Payroll giving — gives staff a tax-efficient ongoing donation route to the CotY, in addition to event-based fundraising
• Paid volunteer leave — at least one CotY-related volunteering day during the year adds depth to the partnership that money alone can’t

The vote is the moment of highest engagement. Use that energy to launch the rest of the programme at the same time, not in piecemeal updates over the following months.

Sources

• Charity Commission for England and Wales — Register of Charities
• Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR)
• Charity Commission for Northern Ireland
• Charity Governance Code
• NCVO — Resources for governance and trustees
• Chartered Institute of Fundraising — Corporate partnership guidance
• Electoral Reform Society — voting systems explainers

The short version

A good staff charity vote isn’t a referendum, it’s the opening act of a year-long partnership. Run it in four stages — nominations, shortlist, profile period, vote — over four to eight weeks. Use first-past-the-post for three or four candidates, ranked-choice for five or more. Cap nominations per person, run the vote anonymously and briefly, don’t show running totals. Honour the result even if it’s not what leadership would have picked. Then move quickly into the partnership, while the energy from the vote is still warm.

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FAQs — JSON-LD enabled

Questions HR keeps asking.

Should we let staff vote on the Charity of the Year at all?+

Almost always yes. A staff vote is the single biggest driver of engagement in a Charity of the Year programme. Leadership-imposed selections produce weaker fundraising, lower volunteering uptake, and more cynicism. The only common exceptions are when a serious bereavement makes a specific charity the obvious choice for the year, or when the company has a long-running multi-year commitment to one charity.

What voting method works best for an internal staff charity vote?+

For shortlists of three or four charities, first-past-the-post (one vote per person) is simple and works well. For shortlists of five or more, ranked-choice (single transferable vote) reduces the risk of a charity winning with 28% of the vote against three similar opponents that split 72% between them. Most employers default to first-past-the-post because the result is easier to explain.

How do we stop a team brigading the vote for their preferred charity?+

Cap nominations per person (usually one), keep the voting window short (a working week), don't show running totals during the vote, and weight all votes equally regardless of seniority. If a clear bloc emerges in nominations — twelve people from one team nominating the same charity — it's usually best to let it through to the shortlist on its merits rather than excluding it, but ensure the rest of the company has time to consider the alternatives.

Can we exclude charities from the staff vote for being controversial?+

Yes, and most employers do. Common exclusions are political campaigning charities, charities whose work conflicts with company values or major customer relationships, and charities currently under Charity Commission inquiry. The exclusion criteria should be written down and communicated before nominations open, not invented after a difficult charity is nominated.

What if the staff vote produces a winner that leadership is uncomfortable with?+

If the exclusion criteria were clear up-front and the charity passed them, the result stands. Overruling a fair vote because leadership doesn't personally like the result is the fastest way to discredit every future internal vote you run. If the winning charity surfaces a real issue (governance failure, conflict of interest) discovered after the vote, treat it as a due-diligence failure and re-run with revised criteria.

How long should the whole process take from nomination to launch?+

Four to eight weeks is typical for an SMB. One week of nominations, one week of shortlist due diligence, one week for charity profiles to be written, one week of voting, then one to four weeks to finalise the partnership agreement and prepare the launch. Trying to compress this below three weeks usually produces a hurried, low-engagement vote.

Do we need to do the vote in person or can it be online?+

Online is now the default for most UK employers, including those operating from a single office. A simple anonymous form (Microsoft Forms, Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, Typeform) is sufficient. In-person paper voting at an all-hands meeting can produce a nice ceremony but excludes anyone working remotely, on leave, or on shift.